Supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, as sea changes have taken place in supercomputer architecture. While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed, the trend has been to move away from in-house operating systems to the adaptation of generic software such as Linux. 476 of the top 500 fastest supercomputers, 95.2 percent, in the world run Linux. Linux has ruled supercomputing for years. But, it wasn’t always that way.

In 1993, the first successful Linux distributions, Slackware and Debian were only just getting off the ground. Before Linux made its move, Unix was supercomputing’s dominant operating system. Since 2003, the top operating system by performance share on the Supercomputer List underwent a complete flip from 96 percent Unix to 96 percent Linux. By 2004, Linux had taken over the lead for good.

10. SuperMUC (IBM)SuperMUC was named the second fastest supercomputer in Europe in November 12,

2012 at International Supercomputing Conferencein Hamburg, Germany. It is also the fastest Intel-compatible system in the world.

The SuperMUC will have 18,432 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge-EP processors running in IBM System x iDataPlex servers with a total of 147,456 cores and a peak performance of about 3 petaFLOPS. The main memory will be 288 terabytes together with 12 petabytes of hard disk space based on the IBM General Parallel File System. It will also use a new form of cooling that IBM developed, called Aquasar, that uses hot water to cool the processors, a design that should cut cooling electricity usage by 40 percent, IBM claims.

Tianhe-2 is a 33.86 petaflops supercomputer located in Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1300 scientists and engineers. It is the world’s fastest supercomputer as of November 2013. According to NUDT, Tianhe-2 will be used for simulation, analysis, and government security applications.

With 16,000 computer nodes, each comprising two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi chips, it represents the world’s largest installation of Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips, counting a total of 3,120,000 cores. Each of the 16,000 nodes possess 88 gigabytes of memory (64 used by the Ivy Bridge processors, and 8 gigabytes for each of the Xeon Phi processors). The total CPU plus coprocessor memory is 1,375 TiB (Terabytes).

About Me

I started in computing selling the TRS-80 many years ago in the early 80's and got hooked when I bought my own Coco (Color Computer). I've had a computer ever since.
I write short SF stories and Linux/OpenSource articles. I'm on Twitter as: http://twitter.com/ErnieMLopez/